What a cool Idea: PlantSense
Just saw an article about this product that can be used to determine if a plant will survive in a location or not. Read more about it on their website!

The product is a small, oblong object that a gardener plunges about halfway into the soil. While the lower half gauges the quality of the soil, the upper portion gathers information on light, heat, weather patterns and other factors that spell life or death to a plant.

Samsung F480 Tocco - another iPhone challenger?
I think that, if the mobile device makers have their way, we will all soon be carrying touch devices a la iPhone. I am not sure if I am ready to give up the real keyboard on my blackberry for e-mail. I am convinced that I will again be moving to a 2-device scenario - which is where I was before I moved to the phone / e-mail blackberry 3 years ago!

Here is a review of the Samsung G480 Tocco! It does look great but can it compare with the ease of use of the iPhone?

Ad Networks
Interesting article on The State of Ad Networks. It provides a good list of key Ad Networks and their reach.

iPhone 3G competitors
For all the buzz iPhone has generated, it does have some very slick competitors in: Nokia N96, Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, HTC Touch Diamond and Samsung Omnia i900. Three of them run Windows Mobile while the Nokia runs Symbian. Here is an Infoworld Article that lists the key tech specs. I am planning to try the Sony and the Nokia.

@ D6 Conference: Yahoo!
Jerry Yang and Sue Decker were obviously questioned for a long time about the Microsoft deal. The topic has been well covered in the media and we did not learn anything new. A few products thst sounded interesting:

• search monkey (allows additional structured information to be presented with search results) More details on Search Engine Land
• search assist (to help you with query formation). More here ...
  

Yahoo! wants to be where you start the day - the most strategically important Yahoo! products in that regard are: home page, mail, search and mobile.

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky
Have worked my way though this very engaging book over the past couple of weeks. Here is how Clay describes his book on his blog:

Here Comes Everybody is about what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures.

In a very well thought out and nicely presented work, Clay describes the evolution of personal (one to few and few to few) and broadcast (one to many) communications to the same platform - the web. He explains why, I, a blogger with an audience of hundreds and with an ability to respond to every interaction from my readers, am different from GigaOM and TechCrunch, modern day tech news publishers. The technology infrastructure for us to publish is, essentially, close to free and the audience geographically dispersed and infinitely scalable.

Interesting Quote: Core business of a media company
Recently read this quote from Cory Doctorow in Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirkey

Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

Every media company tries to create content that people will talk about. Great media companies create content that millions talk about. Brilliant!

@ D6 Conference: Microsoft
Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer opened the conference. Here are my takeaways:

• Microsoft is demonstrating withdrawal symptoms as Bill Gates gets ready to leave. They sound very nostalgic of an era of monopoly
• Steve Ballmer is very passionate and aggressive - he just might mange mange to wake-up the giant
• Microsoft continues to have their head in the sand regarding the colossal failure of Windows Vista. Steve was unable to convince anyone that it was a success as they had manged to ram 150 million copies down user's throats. The truth is, in the enterprise everyone is buying vista and running XP. Microsoft needs to accept their mistake, extend XP support and go back to list and fix the issues with Vista. Microsoft is very used to being a monopoly that does not care enough about customer feedback. No wonder they have trouble executing in most areas they enter in a competitive situation.
• Windows 7 (expected to release in 2nd half of 2009) has a multi-touch experience. (Here is a Datamation article Kevin sent me). Looked V Cool. Looked cool!
  
• Microsoft feels proud about Windows Mobile and its success. It is v poor when compared to the iPhone and even other phones.
• Microsoft badly wants to compete with Google on Search and Advertising. My bet: Microsoft will end up buying Yahoo and not manage to make a dent in Google's leadership position. Ironically, Microsoft complains about Google's Monopoly position in search advertising. How quickly they forget that they themselves are the biggest monopoly in the technology industry.
  

Google and Apple will win against Microsoft!

Elastra - On Demand Applications in the cloud
One of my VC friends pointed me to Elastra. I think the idea of creating scripts to provision entire servers built up to the application tier in the cloud is v cool.

6 years ago, I used bladelogic (recently acquired by BMC) to manage server configurations. Elastra offers similar features in cloud computing. It makes cloud computing more accessible.

Here is review of Elastra on GigiOM.

UPDATE: I also like Rightscale - they compete with Elastra. Rightscale on GigaOM.

More "Walled Gardens"
Read this article by by Rich Karpinski about the how "open" strategies from each of the major social networks are really an attempt to create a large walled garden - a la telcos. They are all creating gated communities!

In my mind, one of the key reasons we are so far behind the rest of the world in mobile technologies is the walled gardens the telcos have created. Governments have a great opportunity to ensure that social networks collaborate (at least at some level) and gain a real competitive advantage. After all, it is the user's identity and personal information and user's should have control on how service providers get access to it. Also, standard interfaces should allow portability of my information.

:-(